The Shaun of the Dead bandwagon may be rumbling on through its tour of America, gathering celebrity fans left, right and centre (George Romero, Sam Raimi, and Quentin Tarantino are all huge fans, and Peter Jackson has called it "the most entertaining film I have seen all year."), but Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg aren't just sitting back and letting all the adulation go to their heads.

Instead they've started work on their eagerly-awaited follow-up – and Empire can reveal that it's not a sequel to SOTD. In fact, the boys are tackling another much-loved genre.

"We want to tackle the action / cop genre. The idea would be to do a sequel in tone to Shaun but to tackle what we think of as the Great British Action Film, in the grand tradition of The Young Americans and Downtime," laughed Edgar, speaking exclusively to Empire from his hotel in Minneapolis.

"I've always found it amusing when I was at college and there was a spate of films out that tried to make out that London and Scotland and Manchester were as action-packed as LA or New York," explained Wright (seen here with Pegg and the original 'The Dead Walk' newspaper from Day of the Dead, donated to them by FX guru, Greg Nicotero).

"But I don't think there's really been a convincing UK action film. I don't count Get Carter or Long Good Friday because they're more crime films. So I'm not slagging off all the great British crime movies. We just thought it would be really fun to make the UK equivalent of Hard Boiled or Desperado - but very, very English!"

It had been reported recently that action was where Wright and Pegg were next headed, although with the involvement of the likes of Little Britain's Matt Lucas and David Walliams, and – bizarrely – Dustin Hoffman and Alfred Molina mooted for cameo roles. Well, let us shoot down the clay pigeon of rumour with the trusty bullets of fact.

"It's very early days but some of the story was *beep*," said Wright. "Not that we wouldn't want to work with them. We could find a part definitely for Alfred Molina. He's a great British actor and one of the best villains working at the moment."

The only cast members so far confirmed include Pegg (naturally) and Nick Frost, whose Ed went down such a storm in Shaun. But though there won't be any cross-over in characters between Shaun and the new movie, Wright did reveal that the two films might not be totally separate. "I love the idea of expanding and having a repertory company in a way. I like the idea on the next one, as well as involving some of the Spaced and Shaun crowd, to cast the net wider and keep bringing people into it," confirmed Wright.

"We'd like to continue over a couple of scenes or running jokes. There are a couple of synergy things in Spaced and we'd like to take them across, the same way Tarantino did with Red Apple cigarettes. So there's the idea that this is taking place in a universe."

Although Brits and action don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, Shaun was cool enough, dark enough and more than funny enough to revitalise the zombie genre. Only time will tell if this follow-up can do the same for action. "We've got some good stuff already and when we get back we just want to knuckle down and write it," said Wright. "It will have elements of comedy and action and some kind of horror elements as well." Pegg and Wright are writing the script when they can on their tour (and when they're not maintaining their tour diary blog at www.shaunsquad.com) and hope to go into production next year. And the working title for this Working Title production? "There's a couple of working titles. We're deciding between whether it's going to be Raging Fuzz or Hot Fuzz. It may be neither of these, but it could be fuzz-related. I've got to do a film that doesn't have a pun in the title," laughed Wright. Why so? Worked out pretty well for SOTD. "My CV reads A Fistful of Fingers and Shaun of the Dead. I can't do any more pun-based titles. I can't do it. My IMDB entry is going to look ridiculous!"

For more news on the frankly wondrously-titled Hot Fuzz (our personal preference), stay tuned to Empire.

Exclusive: Hot Fuzz Getting HotterSource: IGN Filmforce

Simon Pegg on Shaun crew's next.

January 20, 2005 - They've got a plan, now what remains is to execute it. Simon Pegg and his Shaun of the Dead crew – writer/director Edgar Wright and star Nick Frost – are presently gearing up for their next film: Hot Fuzz.

"We're trying to tell the story of a policeman from the metropolitan police who gets involved in some crazy stuff," says Pegg in an exclusive interview with IGN FilmForce. "It should be quite fun because we're dealing with a culture that doesn't really have guns and the police aren't really armed. So that should be fun trying make an action movie out of that. At the moment a lot is up in the air. I can't be really more specific than that."

The success of Shaun of the Dead both in England and America has led the involved production companies to open up their wallets a bit more. "With [Shaun of the Dead] in the States and the kind of interest in it there, it's been just so wonderful for us, so we were kind of surprised," says Pegg. "Working Title was very pleased with us this year, in fact this year we did them proud, and Universal as well. So the budget for [Hot Fuzz] is kind of more than double what Shaun was."

Production on the film is tentatively scheduled to begin in the spring in the UK. That's if Pegg and Wright can get the necessary elements together. They're working hard to do so, but merely getting their schedules to mesh can sometimes be an issue. Wright recently directed a music video for the band Ash.

"We've just been trying to find the time to sit down and get it together," says Pegg. "We've got lots of ideas. We've made a little bit of real progress already. Actually, we've been hingin' out with the police over here, just sort of researching. We've been going out on patrol and touring loads of police stations and talking to both the cops and criminals; between the altercations. That's all been very interesting. That's the research work we've done so far on the new film."

So how far along are things with the script? Pegg explains that almost all of the elements they want in the movie are there, but, "We haven't actually written it. I've got it next to me now on index cards, it's all written out, which is just the pre-flipcharts stage, so we're just about there. We've got the whole story. It's just the dialogue and the exact structure of it that we don't have yet."

The question comes to mind, why did they choose to follow up with this type of film? Is it the genre that's next worth lampooning? "I know that the action film is very much an American film, and also an Asian one perhaps," says Pegg, "but I think the Brits are very much into American cinema, but I don't think there's been a take on it where the conventions of an action movie have been put into a very parochial British context."

He adds with a laugh, "We want to make a British action film. And we kind of want to do a similar take as with Shaun. You know, the Zombie movie was very much an American tradition, and what we did was we took that and we put it somewhere else."

Many fans in America would have preferred Shaun of the Dead to be released a lot sooner than it was. With Hot Fuzz, from conception to its theatrical release in England and the States, Pegg says, "I think it's going to be out quicker than Shaun was."

Even this early in the process, Pegg has had to fend off the comments that his main police characters are going to slap each other around. "There's that great Robin Williams joke about the British police," he says. "Stop or I'll shout stuff again!"

« Last Edit: April 22, 2007, 12:45:52 AM by MacGuffin »

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Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Get ready for a dose of Hot Fuzz. Yes, at long, long, long last Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s British cop movie – their eagerly-awaited successor to Shaun Of The Dead - has been given the green light by Working Title.

How do we know? Well, we spoke to Pegg about, ooh, five minutes ago and he happily confirmed the good news, which we’d been hearing on the grapevine for the past couple of weeks.

“We got the green light yesterday,” said Pegg. “It sounds as if it’s going to be March, which is exciting.”

The movie, which will star Pegg and Shaun cohort/real-life best mate, Nick Frost as two mismatched cops who team up in a West Country backwater, has been mooted for over a year now, with the delay in official news causing some people to fear that it would ever get made. However, just to put to bed the pernicious rumour (in no way started by us) that Pegg and Wright may have been slacking in any way, Pegg revealed the real reason for the delay.

“We’ve actually been writing it for most of the year!” laughed Pegg. “We’ve been working so hard on it. It’s such a complex script. I think the first draft was 235 pages long because we thought ‘oh fuck it, let’s just go for it, let’s just vomit it onto the page and see what happens’. And we’ve shaved off a hundred-odd pages, but it’s one of those things where if you remove one thing, there’s a pay-off later on that needs to be addressed.

“It’s been a far more intensive process than writing Shaun,” he continued. “Shaun kinda wrote itself in a way, but this took some real brainpower. It’s been brilliant fun and a real exercise in comedy and logic. Sometimes we’d sit there frowning at each other, thinking ‘we’re writing a comedy!’ We’d be scratching our heads and crying, but I think that what we’ve come up with now is a better script than Shaun Of The Dead, so fingers crossed.”

Pegg (and Wright) have been loathe to give away plot points, but both have confessed to us recently that Shane Black has been a big influence on the flick (along with Dirty Harry), so we might be getting something a little darker and rougher than we first thought.

“We watched a hell of a lot of movies before we started writing and his movies have that kind of sass,” said Pegg. “It’s a tribute to those movies, in a way, like a British Shane Black movie. I’m going to sound like whatsisname off Matrix Reloaded -‘we’ve raised the bar!’ - but I just hope we can live up to what we kind of inadvertently did with Shaun. We definitely can. We’ve eaten the bar!”

Sounds good to us. Needless to say, Empire will be all over this the beautifully-titled Hot Fuzz like Velcro. Stay tuned for further news.

"British Shane Black" !!!

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Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Working Title Films today announced the cast for Hot Fuzz, the second feature from star Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, creators of the highly successful Shaun of the Dead. Joining Shaun of the Dead alums Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are Martin Freeman (BBC's The Office, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Timothy Dalton (Licence to Kill), Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge) and Steve Coogan (Tristram Shandy).

The movie, which Working Title confirms will begin principal photography this month, follows the foibles of London's best police officer, Nicholas Angel (Pegg), as he's reassigned by his envying superiors to furthest suburbia. There, in the village of Sandford, the action-oriented officer partners with the laidback Constable Butterman (Frost), and sees little action. That is, until citizens of the quaint village begin turning up dead.

Produced by Nira Park (Shaun of the Dead), Tim Bevan (Fargo) and Eric Fellner (Love Actually), with associate producer Natascha Wharton (My Little Eye), Hot Fuzz will be released - next year in the US, we hope - by Working Title in association with Big Talk Productions.

"We're delighted to once again be joining creative forces with Working Title on this very exciting and very British film," says producer Nira Park. "Together, we're looking forward to giving the police action genre the same treatment we gave the living dead in 2004."

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

At one of the last and probably funniest panels on the last day of the Comic-Con, director Edgar Wright and Nick Frost, best known for their 2004 zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead, returned to San Diego to appear before the audience of fans and give them a preview of their new police action comedy, Hot Fuzz.

Before they came onstage, a few bits from the Hot Fuzz podcast were shown for the audience to give them a taste of the behind-the-scenes, and then Edgar and Nick came out to rapturous applause, having obviously found many more fans since Edgar and Nick's co-star Simon Pegg brought Shaun of the Dead to the con two years prior.

After an brief introduction, Edgar said that he had a bit of unfinished footage to show, but was fairly emphatic about anyone videotaping or photographing it, even suggesting that those in the audience could "hit anyone in the nuts" if they were sitting someone videotaping it. After the lights went down, the footage rolled, beginning with a drawn-out shot of a hedgehog sitting on a police uniform, followed by a shot of a toilet flushing and similar shots, making it obvious that the footage was a joke, which got funnier the longer and more esoteric the footage got.

When the lights came up, Edgar said that he had a few teasers to show as well, and those really were worth seeing because they were hilarious and they all went over really well with the crowd. (Hopefully, they'll show up online soon...on the official site, of course.)

Possible movie spoilers follow...

The first teaser had Simon talking before a classroom about being a police officer, opening with "Police work is as much about preventing crime as about fighting crime…" and then asks if there are any questions, at which point Nick raises his hand and asks if it's true that there's a place in a man's head that would make it blow up if you shoot it. Then, it went into an impressive action montage of car chases and things blowing up, and Nick ends it saying, "That's what I'm talking about."

The second teaser involved Simon chasing after a shoplifter in a video store and as the chase leads outside, Simon gets to a series of wooden fences and asks Nick "You never have taken a shortcut before?", a direct homage to a similar scene in Shaun of the Dead. This time, Simon leaps over the fences quite effortlessly, but Nick has a bit more difficulty.

The third teaser had Simon and Nick sitting in a pub (big surprise) and Nick asks Simon why he wanted to be a policeman, then corrects himself, "Sorry, why did you want to be a policeman, officer?" Simon gives a very earnest answer, explaining how his father got him a police car with a siren when he was a boy, making him always want to become one. Nick responds that his father sounded like a good bloke, and Simon admits that he was busted for selling drugs to students, to which Nick responds, "What a c*nt." (Obviously, this is going to be Rated-R.)

After answering questions from their fans about Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead and their various British TV shows, they showed a fourth teaser which poked fun at the moment in action movies where the heroes get armed by being shown to a room full of weapons—and the joke is visual so it can't really be described—then the caretaker shows them an old sea mine and he hits it and it starts ticking. Nick and Simon run out of the weapons shed and leap over a hedge waiting for it to explode…and waiting… and waiting. This was obviously poking fun of the scene in just about every single "Lethal Weapon" movie and even used the music from "Lethal Weapon 3." The teaser closed with the caretaker and Nick kicking and hitting the sea mine as Simon reports it in as a dud.

Hot Fuzz is scheduled to open on March 9, 2007.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Hot Fuzz InterviewWe chat with Edgar Wright and Nick Frost about their new film.

Hot Fuzz is the new film from the creative team behind Shaun of the Dead. IGN recently spoke with writer-director Edgar Wright and star Nick Frost about the forthcoming flick. You'll find that conversation below.

The film centers around top London cop, Police Constable Nicholas Angel, who finds himself reassigned to the sleepy West Country village of Sandford. With garden fetes and neighborhood watch meetings replacing the action of the city, Angel struggles to adapt to his situation and finds himself partnered with Danny Butterman, an oafish but well meaning young constable. Just as all seems lost, a series of grisly accidents motivates Angel into action. Convinced of foul play, Angel realizes that Sandford may not be as idyllic as it seems.

Wright wrote the flick along with Simon Pegg who stars alongside Frost, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton.

Q: How is the movie coming?

Wright: It's good. We only finished filming a month ago. It feels a bit weird being here so early. I've only been in the edit for two weeks. So, we're here for 48 hours and going straight back into the edit… We got through the first half of the marathon, the physical filming, and now the sit-down marathon… All 1700 slates.

Frost: Edgar always comes out of the edit looking like Gollum… There's no pigmentation in his skin.

Wright: There's been a heat wave in the UK. For the last week it's been like 100 degrees.

Q: Which is nice given that it seems to have rained on you guys.

Wright: You know, it's miserable.

Frost: The worst thing was, once it stopped raining, it was really sunny and we couldn't shoot in that, either.

Wright: That's one of those tough things about trying to do a film in the UK and why there aren't that many films like that—no genre films or action—just because the weather is so changeable in the UK. It makes it really tough. I'm so jealous of Robert Rodriguez just by the fact that he lives in New Mexico. Sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun. It was difficult, and you kind of get four seasons in one day, of weather, so it makes it super tough. It was fun doing those [production] blogs because we thought we'd be quite honest about the process and stuff and cover the bad times as well as the good times.

Q: As you enter into the editing phase...

Wright: For me, it's sort of the fun part of the job. The actual shooting is just sort of—especially with new material and people you're working with—it's never as much fun for the director as the actors, because even if you're working with funny stuff or funny people, you're always thinking about the next thing that you've gotta get… There's never time to actually enjoy anything so in a way it's not until I sit down in the edit that I can actually start, really… You actually start making the film. It's weird. The editing is the fun part, really, for me.

Q: How much ad-libbing went on during the film?

Wright: Not a lot. The truth of it is, because I was writing for Simon and Nick, and obviously Simon is co-writing his own dialogue, and we both [are] writing for Nick… it's a different kind of thing when you know the people you're writing for. You can very much write it within their voice. And on top of that, we do rehearsals which—not all films do that or get a chance to do that—so it was really cool, even with a big cast to rehearse with pretty much everybody. And then based on that, you kind of think of other stuff in rehearsal and that gets written in.

Frost: It's like a week with the three of us of doing tiny bits…

Wright: I do a lot of coverage even though it's got hopefully a naturalistic feel, we have it all written down, all the "buts" and everything. We try to make it seem like it's kinda loose.

Q: Do you think it's going to be as successful as Shaun of the Dead?

Wright: No. [Laughs] I mean, let's hope so. Shaun was kinda crazy for us because we never really… First and foremost, when we were making it we kind of wanted it to do well in UK. First off, we just wanted it not to be sh*t. [Laughs] We didn't want to do a bad British comedy. There had been a quite long lineage of…

Frost: Spin-offs from sit-coms.

Wright: … Bad TV spin-offs. We didn't want to be like one of those kind of films, where people said, "it's not as good as the TV show." Then everything else on top was completely unexpected and it was an amazing experience for us to come to things like this and travel the world and show it in other countries, in festivals and stuff.

Frost: It's weird to come here now, this time, after Shaun of the Dead's been out because it's quite odd to come 6,000 miles and someone recognizes you on the street. Do you know what I mean? An American recognizes you on the street…

Wright: The customs guy…

Q: What does it feel like?

Frost: Good, I guess. Slightly afraid.

Wright: I think he was holding you, sort of pretending that you had metal on you. He knew he recognized you from somewhere and [after] forty seconds of frisking, he's like, "Oh yeah." [Laughter] Obviously we hope it will be as successful if not more successful. We just want people to go and enjoy it. It's not ever really about grosses or anything for us. It's not about grosses, because we never make any money from them anyway. But that's not really what it's about; we just want people to enjoy it and things. Shaun was just kinda like getting to number six on the charts in the States with no famous actors in it at all…

Frost: …Just on 500 screens?

Wright: That was just crazy. It was such a trip and we were so… It was great. It was amazing. It was funny. This was kind of like the first US press that we did at Comic-Con. It was the first sort of American appearance that we'd done. It's funny to come back this time.

Q: Last time, I'm sure there was a lot more anonymity walking around the halls…

Wright: Yeah, yeah. Yesterday we went around at like quarter to nine in the morning. And then at like one o'clock it achieves critical mass. It was bad! It was pretty crazy yesterday.

Q: What have been the highlights of the filming and was there anyone you really liked working with?

Wright: It's got such a crazy, amazing cast, there are too many people to… We were just saying this. It's a pretty a huge ensemble in the film and there are lots of big ensemble scenes with lots of amazing actors in them. It's weird when you get people you've admired for years and stuff, and suddenly you're working with them.

Frost: And you discover that they're lovely. You know, they're not precious or… they're just lovely.

Wright: It would be like a thing, especially with some of the people like Timothy Belton or Edward Woodward or like Jim Broadbent… you'd be doing a scene with them and just talking with them and then you think, "F*** me… I can't believe the Equalizer is standing over there." It was a running joke… Timothy Dalton was such a trip. We loved working with him. He's one of those people where I'm almost more impressed by the fact that he was Prince Baron than the fact that he was Bond. Me and Simon always had a running joke that whenever he would walk past, I'd say, "You know who that was? That's f***ing Prince Baron." [Laughter] The cast is just amazing. So many cool people.

Q: Were you successful in getting who you wanted for the cast?

Wright: I think because of Shaun, people… When we did Shaun, it was interesting that some actors completely bought it straight away and not everybody had seen Spaced, the show that we'd done… and it's interesting, because the way that we write the scripts and stuff, you can read the scripts and you didn't know how it was going to be performed, you would not necessarily have a handle on what the tone was gonna be at all. There were even some actors who were in Shaun, like Penelope Wilton, she passed on the script, because she kinda wasn't sure how it was gonna be played. You could take that exact same script and do it really big and broad, and like a Scary Movie-type film and let's play it all at really a high pitch and shouting all the way through. Some of the actors you kinda have to say, "This is how we want to do it, and this is what the tone of the film is gonna be." This time, though, because we'd done Shaun… in the last film, the casting we had a similar thing to Hot Fuzz in that we had younger actors and people like Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton who are really brilliant, established thespians. Not actors, thespians. So, this time 'round it was sort of a similar thing in terms of a really great kind of mix of younger comic actors and British icons sharing the same frame. It's amazing.

Q: And some in the middle there, like Paddy Considine, who's gonna be up there…

Wright: Totally. He's funny. Him and Rafe Spall are like a double act in the film, and they're very funny. I think people will really enjoy seeing them together.

Frost: They're great.

Wright: They're great. It's really good; Paddy Considine… we met him over the last couple of years because when Shaun Came Out, Dead Man's Shoes came out and so we've been at a couple of the same—not like festivals—but awards shows and things, and he's such a funny guy but he plays this really intense role, so we kind of wrote the role for him, because we thought it would be funny for him to do something just really quite silly. So that was cool.

Q: What interesting conflicts or action can we expect from this movie?

Wright: Running. Jumping. Punching. Car-chasing.

Q: What's your take on it?

Wright: Kind of the point of the film is that in the UK, there are no action films, particularly. There are hardly any police films at all. In the UK, people make gangster films because gangsters are considered cool, whereas the cops couldn't be less cool, not just as authority figures, but the fact that they don't have guns. So you can't really make a British police film. So that's what we set out to do, because we were so sick of gangster films. How can we make a British Lethal Weapon? How is it even possible with no guns? So that's what we set out to do and essentially the first half of it answers the question of why there are no British action films and then we try to have our cake and eat it by throwing in running and jumping and explosions and sh*t. [Laughter]

Q: You kept comparing it to Midsummer Murders directed by Michael Bay.

Wright: Do they play on cable over here?

Q: It's on A&E.

Wright: I've never actually seen that show. I know what it is… I'm a big Tony Scott fan as well. I'm one of the few people who enjoyed Domino. But I thought was, wouldn't it be great if Tony Scott was forced to make a boring film. What if he was making a story where nothing happened, and he still did his style. To a certain extent, [there are] kind of Man on Fire elements playing into it a little bit, but contrasted against police procedure stuff that maybe isn't that interesting. That's the way it starts, really, is that Simon is an all-action, no-nonsense, like a really great cop, a brilliantly professional… and he basically gets transferred to a really sleepy neighborhood and then nothing ensues. [Laughs]

Q: What do you have them doing? Saving cats from trees?

Wright: A similar thing happens here. The police in the country… it's just a slower pace and we did a lot of research into the difference between being a London policeman and being a policeman in the west country in terms of just the crime rate. In one of those kind of towns [you] know everybody's names to the point where you don't have to arrest anyone. They don't arrest people, they say, "Hey, go on home, mate. I know your mum." So we saw [this] as like, how can you inject Michael Bay nonsense into that kind of setting?

Doing this genre is done with complete affection, and it's a similar type tone to Shaun where it's like you can say it's half-satire but half an affectionate homage to films, really. The one thing I always noticed about a lot of action films is [they] dissolve into popcorn logic in the last act, where they get really silly. Even a film like Lethal Weapon, which I really like… the first two thirds, there's some dark stuff and really emotional scenes and then it gets increasingly f***ing Looney Tunes in the last half hour and they just go for broke…

What was so funny is that I get to meet Shane Black, who's a hero of mine in London. I really wanted to meet him because I was a huge Last Boy Scout fan and what was so funny—and he seemed to like Shaun of the Dead, which was really cool, and I met him when he was doing all the Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang promotion—and he did this talk about all his films… and he goes, "You know that scene at the end of Lethal Weapon where they're wrestling around and it's raining and the cops are cheering 'em on? I didn't write that." [Laughs] That's so funny. That's the one bit that we homaged. I think that was Mel Gibson and Richard Donner getting carried away. We had this thing where in the last half an hour of the film it's like it gets really silly.

Q: Have you been thinking of a third one?

Wright: No, we haven't sort of…

Frost: I go back into my glass case shortly.

Wright: …We'd love to do something else. It has to be organic.

Q: With your success, are you worried you can't top it?

Wright: When we did the second series of Spaced, it was kind of tough, because in a way, the perfect way to write another script, if you can do it—the only person who I think can do it is Woody Allen—is to not read anything. It's impossible. It's impossible, because you kind of have to shut everything off and write. It's difficult. We were still doing Shaun press and stuff for what seemed like a year and a half afterwards and it came to a point where we had to say, "Okay, we can't do any more Shaun of the Dead stuff. We have to stop."

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol